June 3, 2015

AFTER A WHILE YOU JUST GET USED TO IT

A Tale of Family Clutter

by
Gwendolyn Knapp

256
pages, Gotham

Review
by J. S. Colley

After
A While You Just Get Used To Itis a memoir. The narrative focuses on the
author’s years growing up in Florida and, later, on her great escape to The Big
Easy. But she doesn’t escape for long. Her pack rat mom, with all her
baggage—physical and mental—soon follows.

What
can I say about this book? It’s funny. It’s raw. It’s heartbreaking. It’s real.
It’s honest. It’s GROSS! At times it makes you squirm.

And
I can relate.

Like
Gwendolyn (Wendy) Knapp, I spent a good part of my youth in Florida. In north
central Florida, to be precise. And while my family’s dysfunction is not
exactly like Knapp’s (all families have their own unique brand), I recognized
that which is uniquely southern.

Unlike
Knapp, I cannot call myself a true Florida Cracker. My family was not
indigenous to Florida. We migrated, moving there for my mother’s health (Ha.
The doctors were wrong—all that mold!). But I lived there long enough to
recognize eccentricities unique to that steamy peninsula, if not to all the
deep south. If the Knapp family were to have a prayer, they should never have
moved to The Big Easy, another locale where the weather imitates the conditions
of a Petri dish; but it does make for an interesting read.

Maybe
that’s the element that makes southern writers so unique. Their writing ripens
in the hot, sultry atmosphere. The kind of atmosphere that enables beautiful
things grow, but also makes them rot.

And
there is a lot of “rot” in this story. From rotten teeth (her Aunt Susie had
less teeth than prison stays), to mangy dogs, roaches, cat-peed couches, soiled
khakis and a staph infection that comes to a big, ugly head. I admit that it
was hard, at times, to ingest all the sad squalor, to not be turned off by it,
but Knapp’s humor and her terrific writing skills made it not only palatable
but rewarding. Amid all the omg!
stuff is a lot of laughs and humanity. Without giving anything away, there is a
scene where Wendy lies down among the flowers, if only for a few minutes, as if
to be cleansed of all the tawdriness. Good for her.

Knapp
has a talent for capturing the essence of a character, or a scene, though keen
observation. She captures this absurd situation when she goes with her
boyfriend to pay the rent at his gay, drug-dealing slumlord’s house:

People wanting to
buy dime bags or pay rent or get their bangs trimmed mingled around the
enormous black marble island in the kitchen.

There
are many quotable passages, but I’ll leave them for readers to discover on
their own.

The
story did jump around a bit in the first half. This isn’t necessarily a bad
thing, events don’t have to be told in a linear fashion, but a few times I had
to stop and think. And there were a lot of similes. Three or four on one page.
Don’t get me wrong, I like similes and metaphors. They were well done (“their
instrument cases hovering like censor bars”) and, especially in the first half,
gave the reader a sense of the Florida Cracker personality, but they can become
distracting if overdone. Especially if you are clueless to what something is
being compared to, which I was on a few occasions. In the second half, though,
the narrative becomes smoother and the similes rarer.

This
is a great read—funny, sad, tragic, and hopeful—everything a good memoir should
be. I’m looking forward to reading more from this talented author.